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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Pile-On

GameSpy piles on one of the best games of this year's show, detailing all it has to offer.

There were plenty of great games at E3 2005. The truly spectacular ones, though, the kind that you hear people talking about in tiny knots in the hall wherever you walk, were few and far between.

One standout, though, was Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The chance to to get into the standing-room-only demonstration was one of the hardest feats to pull off at the show, but those who did came away enormously impressed with what Bethesda had. Our GameSpy editors were no less excited to see the demo, and while we've already put up our official E3 preview, the rest of our editors also wanted to chime in. In that spirit, we offer our Elder Scroll IV: Oblivion E3 pile-on:

Miguel Lopez: It's been a long show, and Oblivion was something of a last-minute assignment. That said, the moment the demo kicked off, my eyes were glued to the monitor. I'm not really used to RPGs being at the cutting edge, in terms of graphics -- that's usually reserved for shooters, right? But Oblivion is just over the top. The minute the character busted it out his sword, and a light source hit all the engravings on the base of its blade, I was like, "Damn, this is the next level." And it just got crazier after that.

The way that Oblivion seems to incorporate physics into its gameplay is pretty astounding. It's not overt and vulgar -- things don't fly around simply because they have the physical properties to. Rather, the implementation is logical, and genuinely enriching to the experience. Arrows you shoot will stick in wood, but clink off of stone. And if you manage to spot a trap before it triggers, you could use physics to set it off. We saw an example of this in the demo: a group of kobolds were gathered around a fire, unaware of the player's presence. The hero, noticing a series of wicked, spiked boulders suspended from ropes above the groups, snuck in closer to them, picked up a pumpkin, and threw it at the trap's tripwire. The result was a group of kobolds being horribly owned by oversized flails. It was glorious to behold.

Dave "Fargo" Kosak: With all the talk about the "next-generation systems," you didn't really see a lot of games on the show floor that took advantage of all this supposed power. Oblivion was the happy exception. In addition to the details Miguel described above, the outdoor environments actually looked like real forests: swaying leaves and grass, winding pathways, overgrowth ... if the whole point of playing a fantasy RPG is to step into another world, no other game pulls it off like Oblivion.

Bill Abner: That was indeed an impressive forest, but what stood out to me, aside from the ridiculously good graphics and artwork, was when the demo took you inside one of the game's nine major cities. The AI, which Bethesda is calling "Radiant AI," allows NPCs to wander around town talking to other NPCs about non-scripted events. It's not just filler. If you overhear two guys talking about something you might get a quest out of that. I loved how the NPCs reacted to the world around them; if a dog sees a piece of meat on the floor, it's going to go after it. I got the sense that these people and creatures had minds of their own and were really part of the world.